Caparo T1 (2007) CAR review

What’s this, some refugee from last weekend’s Grand Prix invading CAR Online?

No, this is in fact a road car. Well it’s road-legal anyway. It’s the Caparo T1, nee Freestream, and it’s the closest thing to an F1 car for the road we’ve yet seen. Not surprisingly, then, it’s the fastest production car ever both in terms of acceleration and its ability to lap a race circuit. There’s not much of a boot though – there’s always a catch with these things...

Who is Caparo?

Caparo is a massively rich engineering conglomerate with fingers in all sorts of pies and a desire to get a foothold into the market for lightweight vehicle componentry. Think of the T1 not simply as a supercar, but a showcase for Caparo’s engineering know-how. The T1s are built by Caparo but bringing the car to production turned out to be a bigger job than Caparo had anticipated. So Mallory Park-based Cirtek Racing, an outfit more used to running teams in the GT championship, was drafted in to set up the chassis and iron out pre-production glitches. Of which there were several…